I found this book in New York in January, in a display of books that had apparently inspired Barack Obama. Swept up in the excitement of the inauguration of the first black President of the United States, I bought a copy. It turns out that it has received almost universal praise, but had somehow passed me by. Thanks to great booksellers (in this case the excellent McNally Jackson), we can still stumble across books that interest us even when completely ignorant of their existence.
Team of Rivals could almost have been written as a textbook for Obama. Abraham Lincoln became President in the most difficult conditions imaginable. The Union was on the verge of collapse, and his own party was riven between the abolitionists and those trying to find an accommodation with the slave states. Lincoln himself was a minor politician, and a rank outsider for the nomination. He beat far more famous and fancied politicians by a combination of shrewd politics and personal charm. This was a time when the mass media was far less important in the nomination process, and the convention itself played a vital part.
What makes Lincoln remarkable as a President is that he presided over the darkest times for his country, and for much of it he was unpopular with virtually every part of the country. For the abolitionists, he was too moderate, while for those in favour of accommodation, he was too belligerent. In what would today be an almost suicidal magnanimity in victory, he formed his cabinet out of his defeated rivals for the nomination and other sworn enemies. Almost all of them underrated him, thought of him as a bumbler and several openly worked to undermine him in the Congress and in the press.
The Civil War broke out almost immediately on Lincoln’s inauguration, and that war remained the defining issue of his Presidency. His position was nuanced. He instinctively wanted to end slavery, but not at the cost of ending the Union. Instead, he inched towards the Emancipation Proclamation and to victory, frustrating everyone in the process at the compromise – even betrayal – they perceived as weakness. It’s difficult to see any way that the outcome of victory and of emancipation for the slaves could have been achieved except in the way that Lincoln behaved, but to his colleagues and enemies alike, he did not seem to be the man to do it.
Goodwin’s book is necessarily very positive towards Lincoln. Where it frustrates is in being unable to conceive of his making a mistake. Certainly his handling of the army, who commanded it and what their tactics were to be are open to question, and it’s probable that, without such inept leadership as they had for the large part of the war, the North would have been victorious years earlier. In the end, he hit on a winning army leadership of Sherman and Grant almost by accident. His failure to relieve the preening, arrogant and incompetent General McClellan was surely a major blunder, a blunder that cost many thousands of American lives.
Where the book scores is in its portrayal of what life inside Lincoln’s White House was actually like, and the details of the machinations of his cabinet never become confusing or tedious. But always, there’s that tendency to see Lincoln’s actions as inevitably the only way he could have acted, and that refusal to suggest alternative paths.
Lincoln lead his country at a time of great personal stress, the worst of which was the death of his beloved son Willie. Lincoln’s wife comes out of the book very poorly, and would surely have been an enormous political burden in any time. One wonders how a modern day press would have reacted to her excessive spending and her depression.
Goodwin obviously loves Lincoln – and there’s nothing wrong with that – and never spurns an opportunity to tell us about his sang froid, benevolence and love of an apposite anecdote. His personal generosity of spirit comes shining through on every page.
I would recommend Team of Rivals to anyone who wants to know more about Lincoln or the Civil War, but also to anyone who wants to know about conciliation, compromise and the art of politics. Obama is no Lincoln – not yet, anyway – but he could learn much from studying his great predecessor’s conduct as President. Obama has brought many of his rivals for the nomination, as well as Republicans into his cabinet. He frustrates many of his most passionate supporters, and is implacably hated by large numbers of his political opponents, even while making conciliatory gestures towards them. He is criticised from all sides, from the left for not being radical enough, and from the right for betraying the fundamentals of their society. All of these things could have also been said of Lincoln; it’s only the insults that are different. That’s no guarantee that Obama will be remembered in anything like the light that Lincoln is, but anyone who now believes that Lincoln was hailed as a genius of leadership at the time is well wide of the mark.
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